Kev Varney has a wealth of knowledge and a wealth of passion for high school sports.

In one 20-minute phone conversation, he talked with great detail about schools from Chenoa to Mooseheart to Rockford, rattling off legendary coaches, classic winning streaks and star players.

That passion led him to his latest venture: a list of the 100 winningest football programs in Illinois.

Varney, 51, is a native of Ottawa, where he attended Marquette High School. He served as a sports writer and sportscaster in central Illinois, but has worked for State Farm Insurance in Bloomington for the past 15 years.

And while his paying job is not in sports, he’s kept his hands in it, serving as site author for Illinois High School Glory Days (illinoishsglorydays.com), the self-professed “Best site for information regarding closed, consolidated, deactivated and defunct high schools in Illinois’ storied history.”

“It’s so pure when you think about it,” Varney said about high school sports and why he loves them.

Varney began working on the project in 2011. He was inspired in part when his son was playing for Bloomington High School.

“We found out they had won their 600th game all time and we didn’t realize it,” he said.

He got to wondering about what other schools had 600 wins and what teams were approaching milestones.

He looked at the IHSA website as well as another site that listed the top programs in the state, “and everywhere you looked out there, everyone had different totals for teams.”

That’s when he decided: Why not get one place to have it all correct and complete?

Varney used the IHSA website to get started, but his biggest contributor has been Tom Sikorski, an historian who has researched almost every high school football score from 1925 to 1995.

“I got ahold of Tom and he was interested in helping me out,” Varney said. “One big thing he put together was a spread sheet of all the Chicago public schools. That in itself covered a lot of information even the IHSA didn’t have.”

His research shows that East St. Louis Senior has the most wins at 728, followed somewhat distantly by Chicago Mount Carmel at 695.

The top area team is Sterling at No. 24 with 566 wins, followed by Stockton at 28th (548), Sterling Newman at 37th (523), Rochelle at 41st (517) and Boylan at 45th (511).

“The one kicker for me is that I want to get numbers from St. Thomas High School before it was Boylan,” Varney said. “I don’t have anything from 1910 to 1924.”

That was a key point Varney made. This was not a complete list. He encourages any corrections or additions be emailed to him at dr.veeman@gmail.com.

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“It’s a project that will have to continually be updated,” he said.

But for now, it’s a labor of love that will garner a lot of interest from high school football players, coaches and fans.

“I would like them to think of it as an actual accurate documentation of football in Illinois,” Varney said. “We have a rich history. Not to the level of Texas or Pennsylvania, but we have a unique history when it comes to the gridiron.

“And it’s not just confined to Chicagoland. It’s all over the state in big schools and small schools.”